Waterloo

By Gordon Corrigan

Wellington remarked that Waterloo was “a damned nice thing,” meaning uncertain or finely balanced. He was right. For his part, Napoleon reckoned “the English are bad troops and this affair is nothing more that eating breakfast.” He was wrong—and this gripping and dramatic narrative history shows just how wrong.Fought on Sunday, June 18th, 1815, by some 220,000 men over rain-sodden ground in what is now Belgium, the Battle of Waterloo brought an end to twenty-three years of almost continual war between imperial France and her enemies. A decisive defeat for Napoleon and a hard-won victory for the Allied armies of the Duke of Wellington and the Prussians, led by the stalwart Marshal Blucher, it brought about the French emperor’s final exile to St. Helena and cleared the way for Britain to become the dominant military power in the world.The Napoleonic Wars are a source of endless fascination and this authoritative volume provides a wide and colorful window into this all-important climatic battle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Release date: Dec 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781605987262

Gordon Corrigan

Gordon Corrigan is a member of the British Commission for Military History and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is the author of Mud, Blood and Poppycock and Blood, Sweat and Arrogance.

Book preview

1

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

At nine o’clock precisely, on the morning of Sunday, 2 December 1804, the great wrought-iron gates of the Tuileries in Paris were flung open. From them emerged into the gardens the papal cross-bearer, one Signor Speroni, riding on a mule, which had been hired for sixty-seven francs and holding aloft a great silver cross with a curved crossbar on which hung an image of the crucified Christ. It was the Papal Crucifix, signifying the presence of no less a holy personage than Pope Pius VII himself, and, escorted by a squadron of dragoons, it led the papal procession to the cathedral of Notre Dame for the coronation of an emperor. It was to be a unique occasion. The French had been ruled by many kings, but never before by an emperor, and previous monarchs had undergone consecration, not coronation.

With the pope seated on a throne by the altar and with the ministers, the generals and the clergy, the diplomatic corps and representatives of the royalty of those states allied to or occupied by France seated in accordance of rank, the procession of the main actor in the drama left the Tuileries at eleven o’clock. Accompanied by massed military bands, squadrons of cavalry and a choir, a carriage drawn by eight bay horses took the soon-to-be emperor and empress to Notre Dame, where, ceremonially robed and wearing laurel wreathes, they entered and approached the altar. The ceremony was an amalgam of Roman imperial pageantry and ancient French practice with a sprinkling of Merovingian legend. A mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous – the latter confirmed by the launching from the door of the cathedral of an unmanned hot-air balloon festooned with lights in the shape of a crown – it was conducted in tandem at both ends of the cathedral, to emphasize the division of church and state established by the Revolution. It had been planned since the previous May, when the republican Senate voted for an emperor, a decision ratified by an overwhelming majority in a national referendum.*

Pope Pius VII, sixty-two years old and an Italian Benedictine monk who had progressed through the ranks of abbot, bishop and cardinal before being elected to the papacy in 1800, had initially decided that if you cannot beat something then you might as well support it, and he had welcomed the forcible establishment of the Cis-Alpine Republic by the invading French army in 1797. ‘Catholicism,’ he said, ‘makes men good democrats.’ Pius would eventually repent of his approval of revolution and regicide, and the latter part of his reign would find him in perpetual opposition to French ambitions, but for the moment he favoured and was in favour. Somewhat to the holy father’s surprise, however, when, at the high point of the coronation mass, he lifted the imperial crown from the altar, it was plucked from his hands by the emperor, who placed it upon his own head, and then placed the smaller, female crown on the head of his empress.† Not one to be discommoded, the pope loudly proclaimed in Latin, ‘May the emperor live forever’, at which point the emperor left the cathedral to present imperial standards to his regiments.¹

It was the culmination of a twenty-year journey which had taken a fifteen-year-old younger son with little money and fewer prospects from a cadetship at the Ecole Militaire in Paris to the throne of the emperor of the French, idolized by his people and in control of much of Europe.

Napoleone di Buonaparte was born in Corsica in 1769, the son of Carlo, an impoverished lawyer. While the description ‘impoverished lawyer’ may seem an oxymoron today, the di Buonaparte fortunes, such as they were, had been largely exhausted in supporting the struggle for Corsican independence from the Republic of Genoa, to which the island had been subject for five centuries.‡ Carlo di Buonaparte had little financial aptitude, was a dreamer who loved music and poetry, and died young. In contrast, Napoleone’s mother Letiza was a renowned beauty and a formidable woman of strong character and firm opinions who outlived her most famous son by fifteen years. She was married when she was fourteen and Carlo eighteen, and the di Buonapartes had thirteen children, of whom eight, five sons and three daughters, survived infancy – a mortality rate that was statistically normal for the times. Napoleone was the second son, and while he was the first to wear a crown, he was not the only one: his brother Joseph became king of Naples and then of Spain, Louis king of Holland,§ and Jerome, the youngest, king of Westphalia. The other brother, Lucien, would also have been found a kingdom, had he been interested in elevation to the purple. The sisters, too, were well looked after: Caroline became queen of Naples, Elisa grand duchess of Tuscany and Pauline duchess of Guastalla. But in 1769 all that was in the future.

While the family had little money, they were well respected in Corsica and had influential friends. Napoleone’s godfather was the royal state prosecutor, and it was the patronage of the French governor, General Charles Louis René, comte de Marboeuf, who found the nine-year-old Napoleone a place at the Royal School at Brienne, 125 miles south-east of Paris – but only after the boy had taken a crash course in the French language at Autun. As entrance to the Royal School was restricted to those who could show four generations of nobility, a certain amount of fudging was necessary, but the future emperor studied there for six years before progressing to the military academy in Paris, where after a year of study he was commissioned into the artillery of Louis XVI in August 1785. Napoleone had always excelled at mathematics, so the artillery was a sensible choice, but it was also, with the engineers, the one branch of the army where an officer could advance by ability alone, rather than by birth and influence. In November of the same year he joined his regiment at Valence, sixty miles south of Lyon.

And then, four years later, came the Revolution. It was caused by a complex amalgam of an incompetent king, an unpopular queen, a sybaritic court, a wasteful treasury, an irresponsible nobility and popular unrest ranging from anger at an increase in the price of bread to the frustration of a rising bourgeoisie given little say in how it was governed. Although French kings were absolute rulers appointed by God and responsible only to God, a body of doctrine had grown up that French kings were expected to follow, and this included adherence to the Catholic religion and respect for the lives, liberties and properties of their subjects. By the eighteenth century, however, the system had become an unstable compromise between aristocratic society and the requirements of a modern state. The king, Louis XVI, grandson of his predecessor Louis XV, came to the throne in 1774 at the age of twenty and had known he would be king since the age of eleven and the death of his elder brother in 1761.¶ He was not a despot, nor was he opposed to some liberalization, and initially he appointed competent and reform-minded ministers, but he was gauche, withdrawn, solitary, graceless and unable to stand up to those who saw any attempt to put the administration of government on a modern footing as a threat to their privileges. At the age of sixteen Louis had been married to the fifteen-year-old Marie-Antoinette, daughter of the empress Maria Theresa of Austria. This was an attempt by Louis XV to reconcile the two nations but was hugely unpopular with all strands of French society, who saw Habsburg Austria, along with England, as a traditional enemy against whom they had fought long and costly wars.

The regard in which the royal marriage was held, or not held, was further reduced by the king’s inability to consummate the marriage, which quickly became known to all and was the subject of much sniggering in the back streets of Paris, and indeed of the kingdom as a whole. There are various theories about the reason for this, ranging from prudishness on the part of both partners to genital abnormality or a low sex drive, but given the importance of continuing a royal dynasty, the most likely explanation is that the king suffered from phimosis, where the foreskin is so tight that it will not retract, thus making intercourse severely painful or impossible. There is evidence that the king underwent circumcision at some point, but in any event the condition was eventually mastered, for between 1778 and 1786 the queen produced four children, two sons and two daughters. That it took so long for the queen to become pregnant only fuelled the animosity towards her and led to scurrilous rumours and posters that even in today’s liberal climate would be the subject of prosecutions under the Obscene Publications Act. She was accused of rampant sexuality and of having affairs with both men and women, including relatives and several at once. There is no evidence whatsoever that she was anything but a chaste and faithful wife, but as has so often been the case, it was perception, and what the mob wanted to believe, rather than the truth, that mattered.

All French governments were short of money. An extravagant court combined with the tax exemption enjoyed by much of the landowning class and the nobility meant that taxation inevitably fell on those unable to influence policy, and as the poor had nothing to tax, the burden fell disproportionately on the craftsmen, artisans, merchants and intelligentsia. Support to the rebellious American colonists, given from 1773 to 1783 as a means to discommode the British rather than from any belief in democracy, was ruinously expensive to no French advantage, and there were many who, having helped give the Americans a constitution, rather wondered whether they might not have one themselves.

With the king’s initial attempts at modernization nipped in the bud by vested interests, the one reform that did happen was that of the army. The comte de Saint-Germain, minister of war from 1775 to 1779, reduced much wasteful military expenditure, cut the number of household troops who looked pretty but cost a lot,# and reduced the number of military command appointments reserved for the holders of specific noble titles. He was unable to abolish the practice of buying and selling military ranks and appointments, but he did rule that on each sale the value would be reduced by 25 per cent, thus eventually eliminating the practice altogether. Saint-Germain was forced to withdraw this latter regulation as a result of lobbying by those who would lose money by it, but he was able to bring in General Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval to redesign the French artillery, who introduced lighter guns with interchangeable parts and better production methods that ensured that each gun of a particular type would have exactly the same characteristics. He thereby produced a family of French field artillery of twelve-pounder, eight-pounder and four-pounder guns that gave the French the best artillery in Europe and was to be the pattern for French artillery throughout the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.**

By 1789 street riots and general defiance of authority had moved to open rebellion with the storming by the mob of the Bastille Saint-Antoine, the Parisian state prison, and the release of a handful of prisoners and the murder of the commandant. By this time Napoleone had completed the specialist training undergone by all newly joined officers, by spending some weeks first as a gunner and then as a non-commissioned officer (NCO), in order to learn thoroughly the gun drills. He had also participated in crowd control in Lyon, accompanied his regiment on its posting to Douai, commanded the demonstration company at the school of artillery responsible for carrying out various experiments (including the very hairy one of trying to find a way to fire shells from cannon),†† and enjoyed what seems by today’s standards to be an inordinate amount of leave. Along the way he had acquired a growing admiration for France, if not for her system of government.

Napoleone was a child of the Revolution; it was the Revolution that made him and, although some claimed and claim that he betrayed it, there can be little doubt that had it not been for the climactic events of the 1790s, the world would long ago have forgotten that he ever existed. On leave in Corsica Napoleone swiftly found himself caught up in revolutionary fervour. Unsure of the loyalty of the standing army, the National Assembly in Paris authorized the raising of volunteer battalions, its officers to be elected, and by 1792, as an officer of the regular army, albeit only a very junior one, Napoleone found himself as both a regular captain and a volunteer lieutenant colonel and second-in-command of a Corsican volunteer battalion. His tenure in Corsica was not a success – or perhaps it was too much of a success, for his adherence to the Revolution came into conflict with his Corsican nationalism and he chose the Revolution and France, leaving Corsica with his family altogether when the great Corsican patriot Pasquale Paoli shifted from espousing integration with France to demanding outright independence.‡‡

Meanwhile, in 1791 Louis, still technically the head of state but increasingly under threat and in practice powerless, attempted to flee France secretly for Austria. He was spotted and stopped at Varennes, only a few miles from an Austrian military detachment sent to escort him to his wife’s homeland. After this it could only be a matter of time before the king himself came under attack, and in 1792 the National Assembly declared the monarchy abolished, and the Terror, administered by the Committee of Public Safety from April 1793, began. From now on anyone of noble birth, or with money, or owning land or property, or associated in any way with the royal government was liable to be hauled before a revolutionary tribunal and condemned to death after a hasty trial – which often needed no more evidence than a statement that the accused was an aristocrat – before summary execution on the recently invented guillotine.§§ Many old scores were settled, and in 1793 the king went to his death, bravely by all accounts, and was followed nine months later by the unfortunate Marie-Antoinette. Even the di Buonapartes were not immune. Having been forced to leave Corsica, they came under suspicion as possible nobility, despite pleading poverty and mother and daughters claiming to be dressmakers. What saved them was Lucien’s membership of the Jacobin party in Toulon and his impeccable republican credentials and political contacts.

For those army officers who survived the Revolution and the Terror – and most did not, being imprisoned, executed or forced into exile – it was a good time to be serving, for with the departure of so many officers there was ample room for promotion. In the pre-revolutionary army Napoleone could have expected to serve for fifteen years as a lieutenant and, if he was really lucky and very able, to reach the rank of major before retirement on half-pay after thirty years. As it was, he became a captain after only seven years and would shortly be promoted further. It was the siege of Toulon that first brought Napoleone’s abilities to the attention of the revolutionary high command. In 1793, with Austrian and Prussian counter-revolutionary armies closing in, France declared war on Great Britain (and on just about everyone else). Coincidentally there were royalist risings in Marseille, Lyon and the Vendee on the west coast and, in August 1793, in the port of Toulon, on the Mediterranean. The British were swift to capitalize on this and a fleet of the Royal Navy, commanded by Admiral Hood, duly entered Toulon and landed troops.

The newly instituted Committee of Public Safety was in panic mode: unless this vital naval base was recaptured, and that soon, the risings could spread and the Revolution would be strangled in its infancy. Battalions of soldiery, regular and volunteer, were cobbled together and sent south. The British were occupying the landward defences, and if there was to be any chance of a quick result, siege artillery would be needed, but there was little to be had. The shortage was not because the guns did not exist – they did, in quantity and, thanks to Gribeauval, in excellent condition – but the chaos consequent upon the continuing attempts to amalgamate the revolutionary volunteers, the various militias and the remnants of the regular army into one cohesive body, coupled with the lack of trained officers and logisticians (most of whom were dead or in exile), had produced administrative constipation. So when Captain Buonaparte (he had dropped the ‘di’ indicative of genteel birth) was sent off to join the siege, he was provided only with a mixed handful of guns, siege and field.

On reporting to the siege lines outside Toulon, the young captain soon found himself commanding the artillery with a promotion to major when the previous commander was wounded. By harrying and hustling, prodding and persuading, threatening and cajoling, Napoleone managed to extract guns from arsenals all over the south of France, and by conscripting retired artillery officers living in the area and putting somewhat unwilling infantrymen through conversion courses to turn them into gunners, he made a major contribution to the recapture of Toulon when the British fleet re-embarked the troops and sailed away in December 1793. Napoleone had demonstrated his military competence – he had already shown his political reliability by the publication of a pamphlet opposing the rising in Marseille, which had been seen and noted by the brother of Robespierre, effectively the leader of the Committee of Public Safety – and he soon found himself promoted to brigadier (général de brigade) at the age of twenty-four. For the early part of 1794 he commanded the artillery of the Army of Italy campaigning against the Austrians in that peninsula of Austrian client states.

Then politics intervened. In what became known as the coup d’état of Thermidor (July/August of the revolutionary calendar, abolished by Napoleon in 1806), Robespierre, who had sent so many to the scaffold, followed them, along with many of his adherents. A purge of those connected with the Committee began and Brigadier Buonaparte, on account of his association with Robespierre’s brother, spent two weeks in prison before the Convention, which had replaced the Committee, admitted its error and released him. Now his political reliability was tested once more, when in October 1795 a crowd of several thousand – composed of royalists, disgruntled national guardsmen, political agitators and the usual members of the Parisian unwashed, who went along for the fun and the possibility of plunder – began to march on the Tuileries, where the Convention was in session. Paul Barras, a member of the Convention and entrusted with its defence, sent for Brigadier Buonaparte, who had no compunction in lining up his guns to cover the approaches to the Tuileries. The baying mob approached, and when the guns opened fire with several volleys of canister at a range of a hundred yards or so, 200 were killed and probably three times as many wounded.¶¶ The survivors dispersed in haste and the power of the mob to influence the progress of the Revolution was broken for good.

The year 1796 was the beginning of Napoleone’s rise to real power, when he was appointed to command of the Army of Italy. In that year he also dropped the Italian spelling of his name -henceforth he would use the French rendering and be Napoleon Bonaparte – and married Josephine de Beauharnais, a widow whose husband had gone to the guillotine for failing to defend Mainz with sufficient vigour against the Austrians and Prussians in 1793. Only the fall of the Committee and the end of the Terror saved her from the same fate.

Napoleon spent 1796 and most of 1797 in Italy. In many ways this was the most skilful campaign of his entire career. Without the huge numbers of men and materiel, which he could dispose of later, with few officers he could trust and with an army that was little more than an outnumbered, barely trained and undisciplined militia, in a daring and brilliantly conducted series of manoeuvre battles making particular use of the new Gribeauval guns, he forced the Austrians to the negotiating table. Now he was the talk of Paris and the darling of the newspapers. Refusing command of an army raised for the invasion of England, on the very sound grounds that the strength of the Royal Navy made such a proposition impossible, he took command of the Army of Egypt instead, with the aim of occupying the overland route to India and threatening British power there and in the Mediterranean. Initially he was successful – the Battle of the Pyramids saw Napoleon crush an Ottoman army and take Cairo. But the sinking of the French fleet in Aboukir Bay by Nelson in August 1798 cut him off from France, and when a miserable retreat from Syria back to Cairo across the desert began to take its toll on a now plague-ridden army, Napoleon, still well informed on matters political in Paris, left his army to eventual defeat (by a British army in 1801), disease and imprisonment, and hurried back to France, narrowly avoiding being intercepted by the Royal Navy on the way. Never called to account for his desertion and arriving in Paris at the same time as news of his earlier Egyptian victories – and before news of his defeats – he was greeted by cheering crowds, albeit by a distinctly cool Directorate.

Now another coup, that of Brumaire (November 1799), removed the Directorate and replaced it with the Consulate, of three consuls: Napoleon, ever the opportunist, Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès and Charles-François Lebrun. Most people in France had never heard of the other two, and very soon Napoleon would be First Consul, then First Consul for life. In the meantime, he conducted another campaign in Italy, negotiated the short-lived Peace of Amiens,## and was finally crowned, or crowned himself, as the hereditary Emperor of the French.

Napoleon was now supreme ruler of France and head of its armed forces. What he had to do now was end the war, preferably by winning it. France had been at war since 1793, and from initially being a war of defence, in which other European powers, themselves monarchies, had attempted to crush the Revolution, it had now mutated into a war of aggrandizement with la mission civilisatrice being exported by force of arms. Throughout all this the one consistent factor had been England. It was England’s implacable opposition to French ambitions, England’s money and the Royal Navy that had provided the impetus and the finance behind the three anti-French coalitions that had so far been created (there would be four more). If only England could be removed from the list of his enemies, then the others could be persuaded or forced to make peace. But how could it be done? England could not be invaded, and if that was not sufficiently clear before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, it most certainly was after it. England was, however, a trading nation that made its money – and newly industrialized England was the richest country in the world – by importing raw materials and exporting manufactured goods. Additionally, she imported much of the food that she ate, perhaps as much as 20 per cent. If no one would trade with England, ran the Napoleonic logic, then she would run out of money and starve. Hence the Continental System, in which, by the Decree of Berlin of 1806, all those countries allied to, occupied by or under the influence of France would refuse to sell England anything or buy anything from her.

Compliance with the decree was generally good. Of the three countries that objected, Sweden was defeated by France in the campaign of 1805–7 and Spain, a member of the First Coalition but since 1795 a reluctant ally of France, voiced half-hearted objections and then gave way; only Portugal refused to comply. But it did not work. Some British manufacturing industries did suffer a slowdown and unemployment rose, but while the governments of most countries under French influence agreed, or affected to agree, to implement the system, trade with Europe diminished only slightly, smuggling received an enormous boost, and the Royal Navy ensured that raw materials and food could still be obtained from the Caribbean sugar islands, North America and India.

Portugal had long been an ally of England. Indeed, by the Treaty of Windsor signed in 1386, she was England’s oldest ally, and she had always seen England as her protector against Spanish designs.*** Her refusal to cease trading with England or to expel British envoys precipitated a Franco-Spanish invasion in 1807, thus beginning what later became known to the British and the Portuguese as the Peninsular War. As the armies commanded by the French Marshal Junot moved south from Spain, the Royal Navy removed the Portuguese royal family, the treasury and some of the army and conveyed them to the Portuguese colony of Brazil. The last instructions of the regent, John, to his people before his departure were an exhortation not to resist the invasion, at least for the moment, for there was nothing to resist with and to do so would only invite severe retaliation.††† Although Portuguese and Spanish armies would fight as allies from 1808, the Portuguese never forgot that Spain was a partner to the 1807 invasion.

In Spain momentous events were in the offing. The king, Carlos IV of the house of Bourbon, had come to the throne in 1788, the son of the reformist Carlos III, and as his first act had undone most of his father’s attempts to liberalize the constitution and root out corruption and incompetence in the administration. He became increasingly unpopular, partly because he was thought to be too friendly with the French, and partly because of the very public adulterous affair indulged in by the queen with the prime minister, Manuel de Godoy.‡‡‡ There were those in Spain who favoured closer ties with France and who felt that the Spanish administration was in need of reform (as indeed it was) and that some of the less violent French revolutionary ideas might be the necessary catalyst. But old, noble and Catholic Spain – and those who mattered in Spain were old, noble and Catholic – saw any move towards liberty, fraternity and equality, coupled with the Revolution’s anti-clericalism, as nothing short of heresy, which threatened their own positions.

In the year 1807 Napoleon reached the zenith of his power. He had knocked Austria out of the war at Austerlitz in 1805, Prussia at Jena in 1806 and Russia at Friedland in 1807, and when signing the Treaty of Tilsit with Russia, he agreed with the Tsar that the one thing they had in common was a hatred of the English. Now there was only England, which was not only surviving perfectly well despite the Continental System, but also blockading France, snapping up her colonies, encouraging resistance everywhere and, as the height of impertinence, removing the very fine Danish navy to England before the French could snaffle it for themselves – and doing so under the noses of France’s allies.

Napoleon was suspicious of Spanish intentions, well aware that there was increasing opposition to the French alliance and knowing perfectly well that, despite Spanish protestations to the contrary, British merchantmen were sailing in and out of many of the Spanish ports, delivering English exports and taking on those of Spain. King Carlos was persuaded, by a certain amount of arm-twisting, to transfer some of his best regiments to the Baltic, about as far away from Spain as Napoleon could send them, on a pretext of their acting as a bulwark against Swedish irredentism (Sweden had lost Pomerania in 1807) but in reality as a guarantor of Spanish good faith. At the same time increasing numbers of French troops were being sent into Spain under the pretext of protecting that country from an invasion by the British – who at that stage had neither the intention nor the means of doing any such thing. The presence of French troops only intensified the hostility of the population towards the king, and with increased lawlessness manifesting itself in riots, on 19 March 1808 Carlos abdicated in favour of his son, Fernando VII, who was considered to be less pro-French and was known to harbour an intense dislike for Godoy. Then, when law and order had been restored, Carlos withdrew his abdication, although this was not accepted by Fernando or by his supporters. Carlos appealed to Napoleon to mediate and the Spanish royal family was invited to Bayonne, on the Franco-Spanish border.

Now began an almost farcical hotchpotch of Napoleonic intrigue and Spanish irresolution. Carlos was persuaded to confirm his original abdication. Fernando, after a series of threats and bribes, then abdicated in favour of his father, who abdicated again and placed the Spanish throne in the hands of Napoleon, who placed the Spanish royals under what was effectively arrest – albeit very comfortable arrest in France – and appointed his brother Joseph Bonaparte as king of Spain. Joseph had been king of Naples and was replaced there by Marshal Murat, husband of Napoleon’s sister Caroline and hitherto commander of French forces in Madrid. Napoleon could, of course, simply have deposed Carlos and Fernando by force and imposed Joseph on the Spanish, but by going through the charade of a series of abdications and the gifting of the disposal of the crown to him, he hoped to establish a legal justification for the change of regime.

The Spaniards were unimpressed. Those who met Joseph rather liked him. His affectionate nickname was ‘Tio Pepe’, or ‘Uncle Joe’, although he was also, perhaps less affectionately, known as ‘Pepe Botella’ in recognition of his liking for strong drink. He was an intelligent man of liberal disposition who, had he been allowed to, would have been a far better king of Spain than any of the hopelessly inbred, dribbling, corrupt and incompetent Bourbons. But that was not the point. The Bourbons were Spain’s, whatever the opinion of them internally might be, and Joseph was neither Spanish nor of royal blood, and to have him imposed upon them was an outrage to most Spaniards, regardless of social class or political leanings.§§§

In the months before the regime change, French troops had been quietly taking over Spanish fortresses and citadels, usually in the guise of reinforcing the existing garrisons, or sometimes simply waiting until siesta, the hallowed Spanish practice of going to sleep for most of the afternoon, and then walking in. So when the announcement of Joseph’s accession to the throne caused a rising in Madrid on 2 May 1808 – a date still celebrated in Spain as a public holiday¶¶¶ – it was put down speedily and brutally in one of Murat’s last acts before leaving for Naples. Contrary to French expectations, the suppression of the Madrid rising was not the end of Spanish resistance. For now revolt flared all across the country: a provisional government – the supreme junta ruling in the name of Fernando VII – was formed, initially based in Seville and then in Cadiz (a city the French never did manage to take), and lesser juntas sprang into being in the various provinces, commanded by bishops, noblemen, army officers or even by men – and they were all men – who were neither clerical nor noble but hated the idea of foreign domination. So began what the Spanish call the War of Independence.

If the Spanish were to have any hope at all of getting rid of the French, then they could not do it by themselves – they did not have the men, the equipment or the finance to take on the French superpower. There was only one country that they could turn to, and that was England. It was not easy for the Spanish to ask for British help as – despite a few very brief periods of alliance – for centuries the two nations had been at odds: either at war with each other or in competition for trade, for markets, for colonies and for control of the seas. Spain was old, Catholic, agrarian, broke and on the way down; England was brash, industrialized, enormously rich and on the way up. Nevertheless, swallowing her pride, Spain did ask for help -although that help was not, it was emphasized, to include British troops (a stricture that would not last long) – and that help was speedily forthcoming. Amongst the huge quantities of weapons and equipment supplied by the British to the Spanish in the first year of the uprising were: 155 artillery pieces, 200,000 muskets, 40,000 tents (the British army had no tents), half a million yards of cloth and £1.5 million in cash. As a comparator, that cash sum was just over 2 per cent of total British government spending for 1808; in 2014 the same percentage would be £13.5 billion.²

The happenings in Spain encouraged the so far quiescent Portuguese, and